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Now to my topic. I have never grown any kind of mushrooms prior to this experience. Upon doing some research it seemed as if you should start with the BRF TEK. I didnt have a PC so I tried to steam sterilize my jars. I then injected the 10 jars with my two cultures, amazons and treasure coasts. With the jars ready to start forming the mycelium I made a day by day log of the activity. Today is day 20 for this project. I have 3 jars with some colonization and 6 without(one molded). I am going to just let them all go and see what happens. All of the colonizing jars are the tc strain. I understand I may have put my jars into some harmful conditions such as too high of temperature when adding the spores, and adding a heat pad and temps nearing 95 in the bin they are in. So I decided to retry and do them more spec to tek.

I now have a pc. I cleaned my wild bird seed and PC'd it for 60 min at 15psi. waited 12 hours and injected a Golden Teacher strain into the jars and today is the start of day 1!

First off let me say that i am like right behind u...i have knocked up 10 glasses of brf on may 16th...5 with GT and 5 with Z-Strain....They no contams so far and all but 2 are 100%...i am about to mix with bulk coir/verm. However i have recently realized that the 5 glasses i have only = 2.5 quarts which would make my ratio very low for doing bulk...so i have 2 choices i could put all 10 GT and Z into one monotub and hope for big fruits or i can do 2 seperate test grows with a low spawn ratio. Havent quite decided yet

In the mean time i have been reading on how easy WBS is so i bought a 20lbs bag of it last night.

23 Quuart Pressure is next on the list.

Did u use Gypsum in ur mix?

Good Luck and feel free to check out my grow, there are links in my sig... sorry to hear about your first contams.

EDIT: also a heating pad isnt needed...this was my mistake too.....leave them on a shelf at room temp getting ambient/indirect light

Also I am not an expert what-so-ever, but I would advise not to just mix the colonized and uncolonized jars into bulk. I see it as you are only as good as your weakest link... I plan to let my three remaining cakes run their course, Dunk, and place in fruiting chamber, count my losses and concentrate on the new TEK I switched to.

WBS:So seven days have passed and some good signs of growth are appearing. I have them sitting on a shelf now which stays about 81 degrees all the time. Hopfully in a week or so I can add them to my coir/verm.

BRF: Very little signs of growth in my three remaining BRF jars. I moved them near the WBS jars last night for a better climate. At most a quarter of an inch has grown out.

UPDATE on the project!My WBS is looking phenomenal. Great thick spots of mycellium are growing uniformly throughout the jars. Today I gave the jars a shake to get everything mixed up well.

And for my BRF jars that are still going:The one jar that was the closest to being fully colonized had some pinning around the bottom of my jar yesterday(see pics). This was to be expected but i was not expecting it this soon. When I got up today the pins had over doubled in size. What is my best option? I am planning on letting it finish colonizing, give it a couple extra days to consolidate, dunk it and throw it into the FC. good plan?

So I got a chance to make this gem yesterday. It didnt really cost anything and all the equipment i.e. the cardboard , gloves, and 4 mil bags came from my work new.

I also decided to say piss on my BRF cakes. I am dunking the one fully colonized cake now and I noted a really sour smell out of the other two jars I had for this. WBS still going strong. I am planning a larger grow in bags. I plan to spawn form my WBS jars. I will use my new glove box to try to colonize new WBS jars from the colonies with the bad smell. I figure the smell is coming from the soured verm and flour. So I plan on washing the verm off of what is colonized and cutting a section out to colonize a new WBS jar. My best reasoning is to retain spawn of this strain. Plus its fun watching and learning how this fungi works(or doesn't work in some cases)